The present invention relates to telephone answering systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a voice mail system designed to be used in an environment where most of the individuals using the systems do not have private offices or cubicles with individual telephones.
Present voice mail systems, such as the Audix(trademark) voice mail system, are designed for use in offices and other environments where every subscriber or individual on the system has access to their own telephone extension. However, in many places, particularly factories, schools, hospitals, and similar places of business, employees do not have private offices and individual telephones. Thus, voice mail conveniences have not been made available to such employees. Nevertheless, these employees may receive telephone calls at work. In many facilities, if an emergency call is made to an employee lacking a personal telephone, the employee is brought from his or her workstation to the closest telephone to take the call. However, employers generally discourage most other personal telephone calls and if non-emergency calls are made to an employee, there may or may not be a system for answering such calls. If there is, it is likely to be a labor-intensive, manual system based on message notes and there is generally no guarantee that an employee will receive a message concerning a non-emergency matter.
In today""s society it has become increasingly difficult to prevent employees from receiving non-emergency, personal phone calls, and the number of such calls has generally increased. Answering these calls and forwarding messages to employees can be very difficult in large facilities and usually interrupts the work efforts of the employee receiving the call and others in the facility. A reliable messaging system that permitted employees to receive messages, displayed information indicating that calls had been received, and then permitted employees to retrieve the messages during a non-interruptive period such as lunch and other breaks, would permit family members, medical care providers, and others to communicate with employees in a non-intrusive manner, without causing unnecessary interruptions in the work place.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved voice mail message system.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a voice mail message system with a public display so that employees in large facilities lacking personal phone extensions can determine whether they have received telephone calls, and respond to those calls at a non-interruptive time.
These and other objects are achieved in a voice mail system that includes a computer configured to answer incoming telephone calls and ask callers to leave messages for specific users, according to a set of user-assigned IDs or mailbox numbers. The software loaded on the computer sifts through the record of received messages to determine which users or subscribers have voice mail messages. The computer then generates an output that indicates which subscribers have messages and the output is transmitted to one or more display devices in the system. At a convenient time, any subscriber may review the display on the display devices to determine if he or she has received any messages and, if so, may then dial into the computer to retrieve his or her messages.
An important aspect of the invention is the display of multiple subscriber information on each monitor or output device. Information displayed on each monitor is periodically scrolled and updated so that information for a large number of subscribers ID""s can be displayed and multiple subscribers can view a single monitor and individually determine whether they have messages waiting to be retrieved from the system.